


Curtain Call

by entanglednow



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Alcohol, Disturbing Themes, Gen, Hallucinations, Metafiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-30
Updated: 2013-09-30
Packaged: 2017-12-27 14:52:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,311
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/980204
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/entanglednow/pseuds/entanglednow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Drinking is probably a very bad idea. Drinking to excess - well that seems a little too much like self-destruction.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Curtain Call

The only alcohol Will has left in his kitchen is wine, mismatched bottles shoved hastily behind everything else. The standard of which is dubious at best. He's pretty sure most of it's meant for cooking and nothing else, no matter what the bottles say. He thinks most of them were probably gifts, and none of them were expensive.

Drinking right now is probably a very bad idea. Drinking to excess - well that seems a little too much like self-destruction.

"This is probably a very bad idea," he tells the wine, or himself, or possibly the couch. It feels like he's always talking to someone, or something, he shouldn't at the moment. "Though strangely I find myself wondering how much worse things are capable of getting."

Will still feels like he has a fever. If he's being honest, he feels like he has someone else's fever as well, uncomfortable in his own skin, and there's a buzzing just on the limit of his hearing, a persistent insect that won't leave - or something that's crawled inside his head, possibly laid eggs within. Where they're even now slowly swelling and leaving a rapidly diminishing amount of room for his own thoughts, his own personality, his own _sanity_.

He doesn't feel like drinking, he doesn't feel like much of anything. In fact he thinks there's a good chance the possibly expensive wine will end up plastered generously across the carpet either way. But if he's lucky he'll get to at least drink it first. If he's _very_ lucky his memory loss self will clean if up for him.

Though he's not holding his breath.

No, the intention, the intention - perhaps desperation would be more honest - he's hoping, at the very least, it will dull him into the sort of sluggish stupor that will make roaming impossible. If nothing else it will leave him too unbalanced to walk anywhere far. Though Will realises he's working on the assumption that he's any less likely to stray once he's sober and awake.

Either way there is a solution of some sort to be found in alcohol. Since he's tried almost everything else...short of shooting himself in the head, and that seems a touch extreme. Alcohol should always come before thoughts of genuine self-destruction. There's no one to tell him no, there's no one to be the voice of reason. Though he's not entirely sure he'd listen to a voice of reason right now. The smug, self-satisfied, arrogant interference of someone who thinks they know best, who thinks -

He can't remember where that thought ends, can't remember where it began.

The wine is foul going down, but then almost everything tastes like poison now. It's too thin and too bitter. He takes two bottles, wonders whether to mix red and white - wonders whether that's bad taste somehow, whether that's something that isn't done in civilized society.

The stag follows him where there's no room for it, antlers scraping the brick walls, harsh little grates of noise that seem too specific for his brain to have pulled from nowhere.

"You are a figment of my imagination, a cipher, a totem, a _manifestation_ ," he tells it, without looking back. The words affect the wet, heavy clack of hooves not a single iota. They rattle through his brain, mocking him, leaving his scalp tingling, tight and uncomfortable.

He'd never known that a hallucination could feel like it was laughing at you.

Will thinks, at this point, that the mature thing to do would be to just ignore it until it goes away. Though the manifestation seems disinclined to depart, it makes ignoring it seem more effort than he can bear right now. From this angle, the antlers look like splashes of black paint in the dark. Though Will worries, more than a little, that if he were to face it completely, if he looked straight at it, it would be no less real. And maybe that's the thing he's afraid of. He's afraid of losing the seams. Because he still knows where they are, most of the time. He thinks he can still just about see the join between real and unreal, fact and figment.

Will clenches his eyes shut, brief but hard enough to leave them aching. He still feels the vibration of warmth at his back, the wet, animal smell - not the maggot-wet stench of open wounds, but the living, breathing flare of something huge and alive. Something that bleeds.

The fur is cold, but the skin underneath it - when his fingers dig deep and find it - is warm. Alive. The dogs don't react though, this is not real, incongruous by its very nature. No matter what his senses tell him. He's becoming less inclined to trust anything his senses tell him. Even when he's been assured the world is exactly what it seems.

It's one thing to be seeing things, hearing things, sensation is another thing. The ability to touch something which isn't there. Will's mind has slipped into the deep end, strayed far from the edge. It appears to be drowning. Will wonders, belatedly, what happens when it takes that last desperate gasp of air and sinks completely.

What will he be then?

When he melts out of reality altogether.

He slumps down, ignores the meat-warm smell of the room and focuses on the glare of the TV, which he couldn't remember turning on - he can't remember if he actually owns a TV, or if he's making that up as well. He drinks through the confusion, as the harsh, bright screen flickers from laughter, to music, to dialog and back again. It finally settles on a dining table, fully set, cutlery gleaming under harsh, studio lighting.

There's music in the background, something slow and serious that Will thinks his fever-bright mind has more than likely made up, rather than plucked from some long-forgotten, dusty shelf in his memory. It's jarring, or perhaps unsettling is a better word? Or maybe that's entirely appropriate. The camera slides around the table, sweeps through a hallway far too long to exist inside any house. Until it opens out into a red tiled kitchen, the camera slowing and sliding in on the bleached white shirt of a man, material pulling and flexing under the almost ritualistic slow press and shift of shoulders. The blades curling through in hard lines. It's hypnotic, and strangely familiar.

Will gives a little grunt of acknowledgment when the camera pans around further, adding a face he knows very well, hands that he knows almost as well.

Hannibal is all sharp knives and blunt smile, and the empty wine bottle Will's still holding between two fingers finally falls from his hand, hits the carpet tilted a fraction off its base, to canter and fall, and spill what splashes remain against Will's bare foot. He watches Hannibal slice effortlessly, fingers steadying and easing pieces of rich, red meat apart.

That smile, that distant, amused, alien smile turns in his direction and _performs_ for him. The knife cuts deeper, more slowly, everything seems pointed and deliberate. A demand that he watch and not look away. Before the pieces are finally settled onto an impossibly white plate, precise and clean, and Will doesn't have to look at his face to know without a doubt that he considers this artistry.

Hannibal lifts a white jug, balances it carefully and then tips - red spills out of it in bright, thick, slow lines, curling across what is not pork, or lamb, or beef, or veal, or any exotic animal. 

Will's overheated brain has given up on subtle hints, on symbolism, on suggestion and theatrics. It's thrown out juxtapositions and connecting threads. This is an assault, a crescendo, this is indulgent, this is a performance, a _seduction_. It feels a lot like a punch in the face.

Will thinks he's laughing.

He's almost certainly laughing.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Curtain Call by Entanglednow [Podfic]](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1109019) by [illutu](https://archiveofourown.org/users/illutu/pseuds/illutu), [Rhea314 (Rhea)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rhea/pseuds/Rhea314)




End file.
